Spain's "White Elephants" in Construction

This was originally written on October 5, 2011 but I thought it was quite relevant considering this past week I had just heard about Ryanair cutting flights to and from Alicante Airport. Anyway, this article was about how Spain’s newest airport, Castellon Airport, was created in March at the cost of 150 million euros and has yet to send a plane off its runway. They don’t even have an airport license, possibly due to the clash between the socialist government in power and the conservative run region. It was created during Spain’s construction boom with the promise that it would provide jobs for locals and bring in tourists. Yet in actuality not only has no one ever used that airport, it still doesn’t have an airport license with speculation being that it’s because of the clash between the socialist government and the conservative run region. The article goes on to state that this is the most recent example of infrastructure “white elephants” or huge projects paid for with taxpayer money that helped to show Spain’s economic boom and subsequent bust over wasteful spending. In fact, during the peak of the construction boom, authorities rushed to build more low cost airlines and plan new airports to increase tourism. But currently of the 48 regional commercial airports built in less than 20 years, only 11 of them are profitable.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/spain/8807723/Spains-white-elephants-how-countrys-airports-lie-empty.html